Prof. Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also serves on the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Projects, an artists' collective that creates collaborative, exploratory environments for people with physical, emotional, sensory and cognitive differences and their allies. Her publications include Eco Soma: Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2021), Theatre & Disability (Palgrave, 2017), Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction (Palgrave, 2014), Community Performance (Routledge, second edition 2019), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performance and Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), the speculative queer/crip speculative story collection Ice Bar (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and the ecosomatic poetry collection Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020). She co-curates Turtle Disco, a disability-led somatic writing studio in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with her wife and creative partner Stephanie Heit. Interesting factoid: she was one of the first wheelchair-using dance artists internationally to gain a professional dance qualification.